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Relationships that have gone sour can drag a leader down. It can be draining and deflating when students experience conflict with family members, roommates, friends or a "significant other." We all need to feel a sense of security in our relationships, especially when the heat gets turned up academically. We can usually handle our class load and all the exams when we know that we're accepted and cared for at a deep level by family and friends. When we don't feel secure and loved, it's a different story. These relationships are gifts from God, and we rely on them for our well-being.

Still, there is a deeper level of confidence and security beyond that provided by human relationships: our acceptance by God. But we need to cultivate our relationship with him so that when difficulty comes we can draw on spiritual "reserves" that have been built up in our hearts. Unfortunately, we often neglect our devotional life with God, and then feel empty and dry when we most need spiritual strength. I'm at my best when I can sit before God and it feels like an old, familiar rocker. I'm at my worst when I turn to him in sorrow or hurt and he seems distant, like a stranger. At times like that I simply don't know where to begin.

This is not to say that the responsibility, is ours to create a relationship with God. In fact, God has already taken the decisive first step by sending Jesus to bring us back to himself. It's not so much that we're acting as we're reacting. He moves; we respond. So the question becomes, quite simply, "How are we responding?"

Let's go to him now. Let's "react" to his active love by praying, worshiping, repenting-connecting with him, returning to him over and over again until entering his presence is like settling into a favorite rocking chair. No enemy or sorrow can touch us there.

--Rick Mattson serves as a staff worker in Minnesota.